About an American family with a summer cabin in the Stockholm archipelago. Information on island life, Swedish culture, design and building trends. And toilets.

Tuesday, July 20, 2010

The first shed candidate

This one's from Bauhaus, the European home improvement chain (not the German art school). They have a store near Marcia & Rutger, so we've made many, many visits there over the years.

Bauhaus sells a wide range of little cabins and sheds. This model is appropriately called Lillevilla. It has a couple of things going for it. First, it's about the exact size I had envisioned, 1.8 by 2.4 meters, giving a bit over 4 square meters of interior space. Secondly, the price is right, it's fairly cheap at 4995 kronor.

The biggest downside is that it's pretty flimsy. The walls are only 16mm thick. (That's a bit over ½ an inch.) As Rutger puts it, you can't really hang much on the inside, a nail would go right through. I also worry that exposed life on the island will be pretty tough on such a thin structure. (For comparison, the walls on the little house are 66mm, and the big house, 140mm.)

I think we'll have to go a little bit bigger, or sturdier at least. Fortunately, there are a lot of options out there, and we'll look at another in the next episode of "The Shedhunter"!

UPDATE: I thought I had read that the walls on the Lunar Module were very thin, and I was right, much of it was less than a ¼ inch thick. (It is ironic that I spent time today, of all days, looking at Apollo info on the web!) Unfortunately, in my research, I came across many "moon landing is a hoax" websites, which really annoyed me. Idiots.

1 comment:

Anonymous
said...

Janne says you need to get a "real wood" shed, not plywood. He also agrees with Rutger, saying you need to be able to hang tools, shelving, etc and so you should have at least 70mm. He also suggests you call X-house to see if they have one to sell, or one to recommend.

Unwanted advice from both of us is we would put the shed on the north side, somewhere near the sewer system, where it won't be seen from the front. Our personal opinion (which you can totally ignore!) is that to have the 3 structures all in a line next to each other will not be very pleasing to the eye.